Tom Brokaw Special Looks At Pivotal Year For Boomers

TV EYE

December 08, 2007|By ROGER CATLIN

He'll be the first to admit it wasn't the greatest generation. But the former NBC anchor returns to host "1968 With Tom Brokaw" (History, Sunday, 9 p.m.).

The overview of a single year from the decade that is the subject of his best-seller, "Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today" is done in much the same manner - a scattershot group of interviews with various people, with his own views interjected.

Some stories are effective, as when he tells of a pal from his small South Dakota town who dies in Vietnam. But he seems to spend an awful lot of time talking to pop stars instead of, say, former members of President Johnson's Cabinet. And as a fellow boomer, I guess I would have spent time chatting to Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor and Jon Stewart, too.

ON TODAY

The crush of Christmas TV movies is here, and they remain pretty bad. In "Lost Holiday: The Jim and Suzanne Shemwell Story" (Lifetime, 9 p.m.), Jami Gertz and Dylan Walsh find they don't have time to argue until they're stuck up in the mountains in a snowmobiling accident and blizzard. Wonder if they make up and are saved in time for Christmas?

Even worse is "The Note" (Hallmark, 9 p.m.), where I couldn't get past the initial premise: that a mid-size town in North Carolina would have its own lonely-hearts newspaper columnist with a huge office and an assistant. Anyway, Genie Francis tries to find the author of a note written before a plane crash - for holiday column mileage of course.

He kind of disappeared after his entertaining after-hours travelogue, "Insomniac," but the bearish comic is back in "Dave Attell: Captain Miserable" (HBO, 10 p.m.), in which he joins the quite widespread competition of being most offensive comic around (even his fans draw the line at the child-abuse stuff).

A little more high-minded is the annual Heisman Trophy presentation (ESPN, 8 p.m.).

Floyd Mayweather lost "Dancing With the Stars," but he has a better chance in his prizefight, "Mayweather vs. (Ricky) Hatton (Pay per view, 8:30 p.m.).

ALSO ON SUNDAY

Yet another tearjerker TV movie this weekend is the cumbersomely titled "Oprah Winfrey Presents: Mitch Albom's 'For One More Day' " (ABC, 9 p.m.), in which Michael Imperioli of "The Sopranos" plays a washed-up ballplayer who imagines another day with his mother, played by Ellen Burstyn. Imperioli's son, Vadim, steals the show as a young version of his character in flashbacks. The whole thing was shot in Bridgeport and Norwalk last summer.

What might otherwise be a dull look at an archaeological find in China becomes enlivened by all manner of fierce computer images of newfound dinosaurs in "Dino Deathtrap" (National Geographic, 8 p.m.).

The fifth Video Game Awards (Spike, 9 p.m.) is not just an opportunity to honor nerds but to preview 2008 fare.

The finale of "There's Something About Miriam" (Fox Reality, 1 a.m.) comes with a surprise everybody knows about except the winner.